Saturday, October 30, 2010

After having been denied participation initially, I did get to attend the second day of GTAC thanks to Simon Stewart helping me get in. I met a lot of interesting people, and spoke at length to the WebDriver folks, comparing notes, discussing road-map and about possible use of WebDriver underneath Sahi. It is going to take us a little while to do an honest appraisal and see whether that is the right direction to take.

GTAC was good over all, in the quality of crowd. The talks were interesting. James Whittaker definitely lost my vote when he said something like "Honestly I was not thrilled when I heard GTAC was in India. I did not expect much, <pause>, and I must say, I am not disappointed". Seriously man, next time think before you say something like that, or be dishonest. Btw, some morons clapped at this.

There was one other instance where I thought I need to add my comments. During a discussion, where I mentioned that going back to the web developer to add ids increases turn-around time, Simon jumped to say that it is wrong to have teams separate, they should be sitting next to each other and should get it fixed immediately. This may be the ideal situation (I strongly question that too), but it is definitely not what is practised or feasible in the industry. While interactions are good, minimizing the testers dependence on the developer is required. They may wish to discuss business logic, but really why should they know the internal ids that need to be added to the view. It is just a waste of time. Adding ids is also not always possible when using off the shelf javascript UI frameworks. Why burden everyone with ids when tools like Sahi can do without the ids? I wish the discussion had stuck to testability and not gone off to project management.

Those aside, I think GTAC was good. Thanks GTAC for letting me be there at least for the second day!

Man.. You never accepted my point when we had the similar discussion. You don't even need two roles in the same team. Why can't they just open the damn code, add ids or add code which generates deterministic ids? (Tooo extreme eh?)

James.. I am never a fan of him from the beginning from the time he came from M$

@Sai, that is definitely extreme :D The point is it is not trivial when you are using other UI frameworks. Have a look at applications using extjs, gwt, dojo or zkoss. They generate their own ids and are tough (and unnecessary) to manage from your application.

I am not suggesting it is important but it is good (i feel). If someone has formed an opinion without any first hand experience and then comes up and says that he was wrong, then I do not see condescension in it. Anyways, that was probably a minor point.